We are building the Gulf's first specialty coffee platform, one roastery at a time.
There are over two hundred roasteries in the UAE and no platform. 12 Degrees acquires established roasting businesses and brings their volume onto a single operation — centralised production, green bought as one book, one distribution network.
What we see in this market
The Gulf is building a specialty coffee industry faster than it is building the companies to hold it.
$3.2bn
UAE coffee market
A market growing faster than any comparable one
Gulf consumption moved from instant to specialty inside a decade, and demand here is non-discretionary — coffee is embedded in daily life, so volumes hold through economic cycles.
MEAccurate, UAE coffee market
8–9%
expected five-year growth
Fragmenting, not consolidating
Hundreds of independent roasters compete for the same origins, the same equipment and the same shelf. Almost none is large enough to set terms with a supplier, a landlord or a freight forwarder.
MEAccurate
8,800+
coffee shops in the UAE
Costs the single site can no longer carry
Green bought at spot. Freight at list. A roaster idle five days a week, and a compliance burden sized for a company ten times larger. The arithmetic that worked at ten tonnes a year stops working long before a hundred.
World Coffee Portal, Project Café ME 2024–25
What we do
One platform, built by acquisition.
We acquire established roasteries and bring their volume onto a single modern operation — consolidated production, unified green buying, shared logistics and back office. The value comes from scale no independent site can reach on its own volume.
For an owner, that means a buyer who is not learning the business on your time. We have run roasting operations in this region — green contracts, production schedules, distribution and the compliance that comes with all of it — so the questions we ask are the ones that matter, and there are fewer of them. What follows completion is an operating plan rather than a discovery exercise.
If you own a roastery
Thinking about what comes next
Succession, a clean exit, or selling part of the business now and staying with it as the platform is built. What we look for, what we commit to, and how the first conversation works.
For owners considering a saleIf you are a brand or an operator
Roasting, capacity and supply
We are building capacity by acquisition. If you need coffee roasted, or you are running a roastery well below capacity, the conversation is more useful early than late.
For brands and operatorsWho we are
Two people who have already built a coffee business of scale in this region, together.
Robert Jones has spent over twenty years building coffee businesses in the GCC, and has run the full value chain from green buying through roasting, manufacturing and distribution to the cup. He is one of a small number of operators in the region who has taken a specialty coffee business from early stage to genuine scale, and the thesis behind this platform comes directly from that experience rather than from observation.
As Group Managing Director of Coffee Planet he took the business from a small importer to a crop-to-cup group of circa USD 100 million, serving more than 800 B2B clients across 15 territories with its own roasting and manufacturing capability, and built it into one of the most established specialty coffee operations in the region. That covered green sourcing and supply chain, roasting and production, B2B commercial and key accounts, international market entry, and the operational infrastructure that sits underneath a group of that size. It is the same infrastructure this platform is designed to give to businesses that cannot build it alone.
During 2025 he served as interim Chief Executive Officer of Lavazza EuroCoffee in the UAE, taking executive responsibility for a major international coffee brand's regional operation and leading work on its restructuring strategy. The mandate covered commercial and operational restructuring, cost and margin discipline, and repositioning the business for its next phase, which is the same set of questions that arises inside every acquisition this platform will make.
He now runs Authority.Coffee, the GCC coffee advisory and market intelligence platform, through which he publishes on the regional market, advises operators and counterparties across the sector, and maintains an unusually wide view of who is trading, who is growing and who is approaching a natural exit point. That vantage point is where the acquisition pipeline for this platform originates.
He describes himself as a businessperson in coffee rather than a coffee person in business. The distinction matters here. This is a commercial thesis about scale, buying power, margin structure and consolidation, applied to a category he has spent two decades operating in and knows at the level of the roasting schedule and the green contract, not only the strategy deck. He is based in Dubai.
Ana Maria Aldana leads financial modelling, the commercial evaluation of acquisition targets and the group reporting framework. She is a senior FP&A leader with over ten years building finance functions from the ground up in fast-growing UAE businesses across multi-site retail, food and beverage manufacturing, and technology.
She was Head of FP&A at Nana, building the finance function from scratch as the business scaled across a network of more than 50 dark stores and an e-grocery operation, owning the five-year plan and the models and reporting suite that underpinned the company's growth and gave its board site-level visibility. Before that she led commercial finance reporting across five markets at Property Finder, and spent three years in commercial finance at Coffee Planet, where she built the company's first integrated three-statement model and the cash flow model for its manufacturing operation, ultimately as Commercial Finance Manager leading a team of three. She began her career with Philip Morris International and Novartis in Colombia.
She is an industrial engineer from the University of Los Andes with an MBA from Hult International Business School, and works in English and Spanish. The relevance to a consolidation platform is direct: multi-site unit economics, capex-heavy business cases, group cash flow forecasting and building reporting that boards and lenders can rely on are precisely the disciplines this business runs on.
The founding team
Robert and Ana worked together at Coffee Planet, where he ran the group as Managing Director and she led commercial finance for the manufacturing operation. They have already built and run a coffee business of scale in this region together, across the same functions this platform depends on: green buying and supply chain, roasting and production economics, multi-site performance, and the financial infrastructure that makes a group legible to boards and lenders. The founding team is not assembling this capability. It is repeating it, at group level, across multiple businesses.
Contact
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12 Degrees GroupDubai, United Arab Emirates